La Entonación del Español de Buenos Aires en el Habla Normal y Patológica

This study examines the intonation of Buenos Aires Spanish (EBA) for the components of pitch accents & terminal contours in speakers with normal (NS) & pathological speech (PS). The population had 132 speakers of NS & 18 speakers of PS equally divided for gender in three age groups (5-8, 18-50 & 51-78). The corpus contained seven simple sentences: 2 declaratives, 3 wh-questions & 2 exclamatory sentences using a repetition task. The data were transcribed using the Autosegmental-Metrical theory (AM) & the ToBI system adapted for Argentine Spanish (Gurlekian et al. 2001, 2004). The results show an inverse proportion between the difficulty of the sentence & the range of prosodic variation between the NS & PS speakers. In the simple declarative sentences, the differences were the greatest between both groups, followed by the more difficult marked exclamatory sentences, whereas in the most difficult wh-questions, the differences appear to be neutralized. The speakers of BAS PS produce what appear to be random prosodic variations as a consequence of their speech disorders. As a result of these irregular prosodic patterns, the utterances of PS have a poor prosodic quality reducing the acceptability of their communication. The results were interpreted according to the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior (Diver 1979, Tobin 1997) which is based on the axiom that language represents a compromise between the desire for maximum communication through the use of minimal effort. Adapted from the source document